Poor But Sexy
Berlin—the cooler, more liberal relative to its traditional Hamburg and Munich cousins and often argued to be the least German of the major cities. Upon first impression, I didn’t find it to be a particularly pretty place. From my seat on the S-Bahn (one of Berlin’s public transit systems), it looked like a whole lot of concrete, construction and graffiti, occasionally offset with cobblestone town squares and tree lined canals. But perhaps that was part of its charm: The city was a living, breathing relic of a place that had endured war, division and a revival in a matter of decades.
As I’d later find, people don’t come to Berlin for the views anyway. Its allure lay in the fact that you could find a good serving of Bánh mì as quickly as Bratwurst; that its largely ‘liberal’ views contradicted the unspoken rules for underground assimilation; that the now thriving metropolis was built on an incredibly complex and violent past.
Though it was still visibly rebuilding itself, from what I could see, it’d done a pretty good job putting itself back on the map. “Poor but sexy” was how its ex-Mayor had described it back in 2003. Though now, the former seems to hardly be true as the city faces the same old issues you’d find in any urban hot spot, from rising housing prices to gentrification.
Historical context aside, I was just excited to be there. Back in New York, I’d had a pretty quiet summer consisting of lounging in parks, attempting to take up acrylic painting and ultimately saving what I could for my two-week trip to Europe. According to the Internet, I alongside everyone and their mother seemed to be planning their own European-summer-escape. Blame it on revenge travel or Gen Z’s European TikTok montages. Whatever the reason, it had been five or so years since I’d been back to the beloved continent, so the plan was to squeeze in as much as possible without feeling like I was rushing from one place to the next.
And so, my finalized itinerary began in Berlin where I’d stay with a friend for a few days, followed by a flight to Lisbon where I’d travel solo for the week. I’d then take a bus down to Lagos for a quick 48-hours and finally wrap things up with another friend in Cadaqués, a coastal town in Northeastern Spain.
But back to Berlin. The city’s renown cultural cache among the creative world reinforced by glowing reviews from acquaintances had me itching to go there myself. Between travel resuming and having a few close friends now based there, it felt like the stars had aligned for me to finally make the trip.
An Old Acquaintance
I arrived on a Friday afternoon and would be staying with my friend Sanna for four days. The origins of our friendship are as any good ones start: circa 2019 at a seedy nightclub in New York. After running into each other later that week in a Midtown gym locker room, we decided fate had unequivocally brought us together to be friends and proceeded to spend a good chunk of the following summer together, even going on a few trips in the years following before she moved back to Germany.
Sanna was the exact type of friend you’d hope for in a travel buddy: She was fearless, list-oriented and had a healthy tendency to both educate herself on a place by the book and be just as eager to go out and experience things in-person. All that is to say, upon my arrival I had a near complete four-day itinerary at the ready.
Tragedy & Reconciliation
Sanna’s apartment was located in Charlottenburg, a quieter, more residential district in West Berlin best known for its high-end shopping and bars and being home to the grand Charlottenburg Palace. We spent my first day exploring the area by eating cheesecake under the destroyed tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, browsing stores along the colorful Kant Street and wandering around Bikini Berlin Mall. Later that afternoon, we stopped by a party hosted by some of her old flat mates who made a mean spritz and taught me how to open beer bottles with a lighter.
But it was after we ventured further into the city in the following days that I found myself growing especially fond of the East side, which seemed more eclectic in its appearance and activities and was also home to many of the city’s most important landmarks. Among them, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews, which consisted of 2,711 towering stone slabs laid out on a sloping field forming what looked like a disjointed maze that visitors were free to roam between. There was also the Jewish Museum’s ‘Fallen Leaves’ exhibition, a chilling recollection of the horrors from the Holocaust consisting of a room filled with 10,000 agape faces cut from round iron plates that loudly clanked as people carefully tread through. And nearby, the Topography of Terror, which led viewers through the timeline of the Nazi Regime in painstaking detail, putting faces behind the victims, criminals and heroes of the era.
The Berlin Wall exhibitions, like the East Side Gallery and Checkpoint Charlie, were just as notable and highlighted the insane lengths to which people went in an attempt to escape from East to West Berlin during the Cold War. Perhaps the most memorable anecdote was that of the Bethke brothers who shot an arrow attached to a zip wire across the wall, then proceeded to use homemade wooden pulleys to finesse their way over. Other honorable mentions include the senior citizens that dug underground escape tunnels or the acrobat that tightrope walked his way to freedom.
While incredibly unsettling, I remember being in awe of the scale, quality and detail that went into these exhibitions which highlighted what were essentially Berlin’s darkest moments in history. It felt like a demonstration of a city that was boldly acknowledging rather than shying away from its past in an effort to build itself a better future.
Amid paying our respects to the historical sites, we attempted to balance out heavier exhibition visits with lighter, more leisurely activities. This included hunting for new denim and leather at an open air flea market, people-watching from a cafe terrace, inhaling burritos on a cigarette-littered park, sipping ciders by the canal during golden hour and watching an outdoor Charlie Chaplin movie to the backdrop of a live jazz quartet. The range of things to do seemed endless, and it reminded me of New York in that, as long as you knew the goings-on in the city and had a reliable transportation system at your disposal, you would never be bored.
Where Hedonism and Techno Meet
While planning my stay, the one request I made to Sanna was to get a true sample of Berlin’s techno culture. I fully realized how corny of a request I was making, perhaps akin to a New York visitor insisting on seeing the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building up close (neither of which I have yet to do after four years of living in Manhattan). But I had seen too many documentaries and heard too many wild stories on the city’s underground nightlife to not experience it firsthand. It was a matter of personal field research.
Berghain was the face of this scene and the global mecca of underground techno, but it was also infamous for its long queues and arbitrary exclusivity. Anecdotes noted you could wait in a five-hour line only to have the bouncer take one look at you and decide you weren’t quite a fit, no explanation given. Not wanting to waste one of my four nights waiting in a line just to be rejected, Sanna instead suggested we opt for KitKatClub, a popular fetish club that played quality techno and had a strict less-is-more dress code (a fitting reputation given its founding in 1994 by an Austrian pornographic filmmaker and his partner). Anticipating that we wouldn’t need to wait more than 1.5 hours to get in, we slipped on our makeshift fishnet-lingerie-combat-boot ensembles and stormed off into the night.
It was 1AM when we finally made it through the doors of the club, where we stepped into a tent-like area for coat check, which really just ended up being a full clothing check. Phones were also handed in due to a strict no camera policy. After adjusting to having very little to hide our blindingly-sun-deprived bodies, we were free to venture in under one simple rule: Do what you want but stay in communication. At our disposal was then a maze of darkly-lit rooms, each seemingly with their own theme and purpose. There was a neon-lit dance area with stages, poles and a rope bondage demonstration on one floor, a cave-like chamber with a line of beds in another, a tiki-themed pool area with a swing and an inflatable flamingo and some darker rooms for more private activities. As we wandered around, a deep, sustained bass pulsed throughout every corner of the venue, acting as a north star for when we wanted to make your way back to the main dance floor.
People wore as little as they dared—I distinctly recall making room for a naked, 75-year-old man rolling through the dance floor in a wheelchair. Otherwise g-strings, fishnets and obscure leather apparel tended to be the crowd favorite.
My excitement and fascination quickly trumped any feelings of initial terror as I gradually acclimated to the unique atmosphere of where I was. Looking around, I saw what I could only describe as a bizarre balance of complete liberation and consent, a kind of respectful hedonism, and I could sense how a place like this must have been a blissful escape to anyone longing to escape fear of judgment and digital distraction. I appreciated the fact that you could be someone who was just there to dance or was on a steadfast mission to find a partner for the night, and either would be just fine. It made me wonder if a club like this could ever be replicated back in the U.S., but I’d had enough superficial nightlife experiences back home to have my doubts; it was simply too ingrained within American culture to document and share a spectacle rather than relish in the experience of it, something I certainly was not above.
Without watches, clocks or phones to give any indication of time (though if I were to guess, we probably stayed at least seven hours or so) the night became marked by a riveting conversation at the bar or a provocative scene at the tiki pool. In hindsight, I concluded that that was what a place like KitKat was ultimately about: to allow yourself to be fully present without distraction, have all of your senses engaged and enjoy a collective sense of chaos and freedom with a bunch of sweaty strangers.
Conclusions
Four days passed, and I suddenly found myself boarding my flight to Lisbon. While in disbelief at how quickly the time had flown by, I took it as a sure sign of a successful trip and was simply grateful to have been able to see the city the way I had with my very own local guide and dear friend.
Even in the time spent on my own, I was satisfied by the ease with which I was able to navigate to wherever I wanted each day, as though the entire city was at my disposal, something I only really experience in New York. Sure, Berlin’s urban layout may not be the clean-cut, grid-like structure of Manhattan, but the transportation had been reliable, the environment (relatively) safe and the people friendly. Between that and Google Maps, it was all I really needed.
I knew I had barely scraped the surface of what Berlin had to offer, but I had come to the conclusion that it was perhaps one of the more exciting, complex places I’d ever visited. It was somewhere that seemed to welcome visitors of all kinds in its diverse make up and imperfect appearance, but also catch you off guard and leave you wanting to see more for those very reasons; a historical landmark that made you feel solemn about the past, but quietly optimistic for its future; a set of welcoming arms that seemed to say, “Leave everything (including your clothes) at the door, and just come as you are.”
Original film photography below.
